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KDE Draws Up Plans For Wayland In 2012

08-07-2011, 06:20 AM

Phoronix: KDE Draws Up Plans For Wayland In 2012

This weekend at the Desktop Summit in Berlin, plans were presented by Martin Gr??lin, the maintainer of the KWin compositing window manager, for supporting the Wayland Display Server as an alternative to KDE being limited to X11. For early adopters and those using Plasma Active, KDE on Wayland should become a reality in the 2012 calendar year.

Wayland will appear in MeeGo Tablet UX, also known as "MeeGo UX". MeeGo Touch UX is misleading (in addition to being wrong), since "MeeGo Touch Framework" is the Qt QGraphicsView based framework that has been deprecated (at expense of QML), and has been removed from future MeeGo versions

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What a waste of everyone's time. Of course, KDE already broke the desktop by dropping support for multiple X screens, so moving to a toy display server won't make it any more unusable than it already is.

Comment

What a waste of everyone's time. Of course, KDE already broke the desktop by dropping support for multiple X screens, so moving to a toy display server won't make it any more unusable than it already is.

Wayland or Xorg is up to the distros. If I read this correctly what they're doing is modularizing the backend of the display server that is being used, which will help the efforts of KDE going everywhere, should be particularly good for the very important KDE on windows efforts.

Comment

I suspect that Wayland is different.
1) Meego already has a definate timetable for migration to Wayland. I suspect that most Linux based systems targeting mobile computing will go this way too.
2) Wayland solves some problems without needing to replace X (see is Wayland replacing X on this page http://wayland.freedesktop.org/faq.html). So it is likely that it will become of the standard install on most linux distros.
3) It's possible to run X over Wayland giving you access to X applications.
4) The major crossplatform toolkits already have some support for wayland with Qt I think its a runtime switch. porting a lot of linux applications will not be much different.
5) Wayland has a lot better backing than other (next X) projects and has attention of the major Distros.

Wayland will probably make it into mobile computing in the short to medium term and might replace X in desktop Linux in the medium to long term.

Migration will probably look like this
1) Wayland handles switching between X sessions.
2) Wayland becomes the root server with X running on top if this approach becomes an improvement for enough people.
3) The X server running on top can be dropped if or when nobody is using it.

I personally need high performance OpenGL 4.x so I will not personally be using Wayland until either the open source drivers reach feature/performance parity with the closed drivers or the closed drivers are ported to KMS.

I don't really see any point in cheering for either team at this point. I will go with which ever approach makes my life easiest.